The Philippines will serve as ASEAN Chair in 2017, at which time ASEAN will mark its 50th anniversary. Having successfully served as host of APEC in 2015, the country has demonstrated that facilitating massive, significant international events is well within its capability—thus observers’ attention can focus on substance instead of administrative details. And there is considerable attention directed to the Philippines at the moment, not least because of the outspoken new president, Rodrigo Duterte. The Philippines is expected to have the fastest growth for the second year in a row among the five major economies in ASEAN. The president’s economic managers, and their foreign interlocutors, continue to focus on continuity of macro-policies and they are expected to intensify efforts to ensure that growth becomes more inclusive in order to reduce stubbornly high levels of poverty.